William Duncan Strong

William Duncan Strong, (born June 30, 1899, Portland, Ore., U.S.—died Jan. 29, 1962, New York), American anthropologist who studied North and South American Indian cultures and emphasized the value of archaeological data and a historical approach.

The son of an attorney for Pacific Coast and Alaskan Indian tribes, Strong was early involved with Indian culture and at the University of California, Berkeley, was deeply influenced by anthropologist A.L. Kroeber. As an assistant curator of North American ethnology and archaeology with the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (1926–29), he did field work in southern California that persuaded him of the necessity for knowledge of the past to gain understanding of living cultures; he also concluded that insight into prehistoric cultures should ideally proceed from knowledge of living cultures. Strong became professor of anthropology and director of the archaeological survey, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (1929–31), and was associated with the American Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1931–37). He utilized archaeological, historical, and ethnographic facts in his study of nomadic Plains Indians, An Introduction to Nebraska Archaeology (1935).

Strong was appointed assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1937 and was a professor there from 1942 to 1962. His field work in Honduras (1937) and on the Great Plains of the U.S. (1938 and 1940) preceded his initial investigations in Peru in the early 1940s on pre-Columbian cultures. In Cross Sections of New World Prehistory (1943) he indicated the principal areas of concern for South American archaeology after World War II. One of his most dramatic discoveries (1946) was the 1,000-year-old tomb of Ai apaec, the warrior god of the Virú River valley of coastal Peru. In 1952 he made his last Peruvian expedition and, with Clifford Evans, Jr., published work on Virú valley cultural stratigraphy.